News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

On January 28, 1986 despite the warnings of engineers not to launch in freezing temperatures, NASA management chose to launch Space Shuttle Challenger. The result was the loss of 7 astronauts in a horrific explosion 73 seconds later when flames from a solid rocket booster leak from a **** o-ring and burned through the main fuel tank. The solid rocket boosters remained intact after the explosion and continued on out of control before mission control sent a self destruct signal to them so they could not cause destruction on the ground.

This video gives a detailed and technical explanation of the entire Challenger accident including pre-launch assembly, launch, post-launch, and accident investigation. It is highly recommended that the entire video be viewed to get a full understanding of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident.

Posted by: AGelbert

Animation depicting NASA’s Space Launch System, the world's most powerful rocket for a new era of human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. With its unprecedented capabilities, SLS will launch astronauts in the agency’s Orion spacecraft on missions to explore multiple, deep-space destinations, including Mars. Traveling to deep space requires a large vehicle that can carry huge payloads, and future evolutions of SLS with the exploration upper stage and advanced boosters will increase the rocket’s lift capability and flexibility for large vehicle that can carry huge payloads, and future evolutions of SLS with the exploration upper stage and advanced boosters will increase the rocket’s lift capability and flexibility for multiple types of mission needs.

Everything you could want to know about Mars, in 4K! Real HD photos and videos taken by rovers and orbiters around the Red Planet.

We discuss the orbit, climate, geographical features, polar ice caps of Mars, and a lot more. Have any questions? Post in the comments. If you did find this video interesting, please share it as it will help me be able to make more of these in the future.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: You know, I can reason out an expanding earth from the gravity problems that large dinosaurs present. The physical size, as well as the nerve sensation transmission and circulatory system physiology of a land animal is size limited by gravity. But the claim that fossil fuels are a "renewable resource" is absolute balderdash!

Whenever someone wants to lie to you effectively, they will start with a lot of truth that challenges modern scientific assumptions AND THEN CAREFULLY mix the mendacious propaganda along the way. I suspect a some fossil fuel industry money funded that bold faced LIE in the above video about fossil fuels being "Renewable".

The following well researched and illustrated video gets into the irrefutably impossible to solve physiological problems with the size of the large dinosaurs in our present gravity:

Large Dinosaurs and their Gravity Problems

The Ganymede Hypothesis

Quote

Streamed live on Jun 25, 2016

Problems involving torque, square/cube phenomena, blood pressure and other conundrums which would make life in our present world impossible for a large dinosaur.

Agelbert NOTE: If you think the dinosaurs existed in our present gravity, you believe an impossibility. Yes, mainstream paleo poobas want you to believe that lie. What you need to ask yourself is, WHY do they insist on that easily deconstructed unscientific baloney?

BECAUSE they would then have to doubt the assumption that earth never expanded. They do not want to do that. That would make them look like a pack of fools. They are proud of their pet theories and will stick to them, no matter how irrational.

Science has done a lot of good. But making scientific theories equivalent to God's laws is irrational and foolish. There is only one God, and He is 100% TRUTH, unlike the Scientific Community, which barely passes the 51% mark on any given day.

There’s no geological model to fully explain how uplifted passive margins formed, but we do see them in the world. The Scandinavian Mountains, Eastern Greenland, the Brazilian Highlands or Australia’s Great Dividing Range are such examples, owing their existence to some uplifting mechanism.

Hotspot mountains

The trail of underwater mountains created as the tectonic plate moved across the Hawaii hotspot over millions of years. Image credits: USGS.

Although once thought to be identical to volcanic mountains, new research has shed some light on this belief. Hotspots are volcanic regions thought to be fed by a part of the underlying mantle which is significantly hotter than its surroundings. However, even though that hot area is fixed, the plates move around it — causing it to leave a hotspot trail of mountains.

agelbert • Great article! I know that it is very controversial in main stream academic geology circles, but what do you think of the theory of global expansion causing mountain formation as the surface of the sphere becomes less curved? There is indisputable geologic evidence that all the ocean basins are much younger than the earth's crust on continents. Tectonic plate theory does not have an answer to that but the expanding earth theory fits the planetary geology much better. I am not saying that plate tectonics are not involved in mountain formation; I am saying that an expanding globe combined with plate tectonics is a more comprehensive theory of our geology.

Mihai > ⦁ agelbert ⦁ I'm not particularly familiar with this theory, but the tectonic mechanism of orogeny is pretty well established.

agelbert > Andrei Mihai • Well, the maximum age of the ocean basins is about 190 million years. But the thing that is most convincing to me that something besides plate tectonics is at work is the distance of the oceanic rifts from the land masses of Australia and Antarctica. It makes no sense UNLESS they stretched apart without any subduction whatsoever.

Also, the closer you get to the oceanic volcanic ridges, the younger the crust is. Finally the crust of the earth is thinner in the ocean basins than on continents. All of that argues for global expansion.

I know you will think this unscientific, but I am familiar with stretch marks on human female breasts when they grow too quickly for the skin to adjust normally. The ocean basin topography looks uncannily like these types of stretch marks. But the stretching of landscape on land is a known geologic feature that also appears to be identical, though in much smaller scale to the oceanic "stretch mark" like topography.

Please watch the video and tell me what you think is inaccurate about global expansion theory.

Two intriguing screen shots from the Expanding Earth video:

Expanding Earth versus Plate Tectonics

Continental fit only on a smaller earth globe

Andrei Mihai > agelbert • a day ago

I do think this is pretty unscientific, yes. I'll agree that plate tectonics is not a perfect, all-encompassing theory. It's an area of active research, and the sheer complexity of the subject will have us learning new things years and years from now... but.

The video starts from some truthful, and some false premises. For instance, the oldest oceanic crust isn't 140 million years old. In the west Pacific and north-west Atlantic, oceanic crust is 180-200 million years old. These are pretty big areas, not isolated patches, but it gets even better. In the Eastern parts of the Mediterranean, there are remnants of the former Tethys Ocean, which are 270 million years old (some studies put bits of it at 340 million years old). This is the most commonly referenced map, which I recommend having a look at.

There's a mountain of evidence supporting plate tectonics, so we know it's happening, it's very much real, though we're not exactly sure what's the exact mechanism of movement, and how all of it happens. This is always the case when you're studying phenomena on this scale, and working only with indirect evidence. As for the disappearance of plates, look up subduction. Oceanic plates are denser and "heavier" than continental plates, which is why they tend to subduce and get consumed in the lithosphere.

Cheers!

agelbert > Andrei Mihai •

Thank you for your polite and respectful response. It is rare to see an erudite person like yourself treat a person who is not credentialed this way. So, I am grateful for this conversation with you.

I respect your opinion, and that of the geologic mainstream scientific community. I agree with you that more research and experimentation is required to fully understand plate tectonics.

The only question I have, judging from your comment about the ocean basin age mentioned in the video, is why didn't you watch the full video? The different ocean basin age crusts issue was explained in detail, along with a discussion of the Mediterranean Sea basin.

I have studied subduction theory. I remain unconvinced that such a crustal "conveyer belt" actually exists simply because of the nearly equidistant volcanic rifts from the continental plates on either side in the Atlantic Ocean and between Australia and Antarctica.

Furthermore, subduction is a rather convenient excuse to claim that ocean basin crust is "reformed" with such high temperatures that its age simply "appears" to be much younger than the 4.5 billion year, much older dated continental land areas. The 4.5 billon year dating versus the much younger age for ocean basins as you stated, citing a maximum of 340 million years for one basin age versus 190 million years for others (with various documented ages in between), is not explained by subduction theory.

I am of the belief that the dating methods used by geologists are accurate, at least within an error margin of 100 million years.

So, the gigantic age gap problem between continents and ocean basins remains to be answered.

agelbert > Andrei Mihai •

If the Mckenzie model works for continental crust, why isn't it also clear that the same mechanism is at work in oceanic basin crust (i.e. stretching from expansion, not contraction)?

Well, it is clear to the geologists. But that's where the controversy begins as to the CAUSE of that indisputable evidence of stretching.

In the graphic below, accepted by mainstream geologists, the stretching of the ocean basins is not in question. They admit that the basins are stretching; they simply require the subduction theory to explain that crustal stretching in order to avoid dealing with the ocean basin stretching based evidence of global expansion.

And as to crustal compression, as alleged to be the cause of continents moving towards one another, thereby causing mountain ranges to be formed, a less curved sphere of the earths surface, the result of an expanding globe, is a better explanation of how absolutely every mountain range on earth was formed. Just look, with unbiased eyes, at the location of mountain ranges and you will see what I mean.

Mountain range creation can be modeled on a tiny scale by arcing a 4' by 8' piece of plywood, fixing it in position, and applying plaster of Paris at varying thicknesses over it. After the plaster is hard in a day or so, gradually reduce the curvature and observe the "crustal compression", NOT from "continental plate collisions", but from a less curved surface.

This effect can also be observed in an inflated balloon covered with mud that is allowed to dry. When the balloon is further inflated the compression of the mud to form miniature "mountain ranges" and "ocean basins, where the added balloon area appears, is obvious to anyone but a mainstream geologist. I think they are just stubborn and set in their ways. But someday the obvious reality of an expanding globe will be accepted over the convenient theory of subduction invented to avoid accepting the reality of an expanding globe.

Cheers!

Posted by: AGelbert

Mountains have played a central role in human culture since times immemorial. Yet it’s only recently that we’ve started to understand how mountains form and develop; to this day, these magnificent landforms still hold many secrets. There are several ways to analyze and classify mountains depending on what field of science you come from, but here, we’ll have a look at the most common classification and then go into a bit more detail.

Aerial view of Mount Everest from the south. The Himalayas are fold mountains. Image credits: airline company Drukair in Bhutan.

The Rocky Mountains are a great example of fold mountains. Image credits: National Park Service Digital Image Archives.

These are the not only the most common, but also the biggest types of mountains (on Earth, at least). Fold mountain chains can spread over thousands of kilometers — we’re talking about the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, all the big boys. They’re also relatively young mountains (which is another reason they’re so tall, as they haven’t been thoroughly eroded), but that’s “young” in geological terms — still a few good tens of millions of years.

In order to understand how fold mountains form and develop, we have to dip our fingers into some tectonics. The Earth’s litosphere is split into rigid plates which move independently to each other. There are seven major plates, and several smaller ones across the world. When two plates collide, all sorts of things can start happening. For instance, if one is denser than the other (oceanic plates are typically denser due to the rocks they are made of), a process a subduction will start — the heavier one will slowly glide beneath the other one. But if they have relatively similar densities, then they will start to crumple up and drive movement upwards. Basically, the tectonic plates are pushed, but since neither can slide beneath each other, they just build up geological folds. To get a better idea of how this looks like, try to push two pieces of papers towards each other. Some parts will go up, and those are the mountains.

Sometimes, the folding happens inside the continent and is associated with faulting. This is a representation of that process, in northern Montana, USA and Southern Alberta, Canada. Image credits: Greg Beaumont, National Park Service.

This process is called orogeny (giving birth to mountains) and it generally takes millions of years for it to complete. Many of today’s fold mountains are still developing as the tectonic process unfolds. The process doesn’t only happen on tectonic edges, sometimes the mountain-generating fold process can take place well inside a tectonic plate.

Block mountains (or fault-block)

Whereas the previous category was all about folds, this one is all about faults; geological faults, that is.

Depiction of the block-faulting process. Image credits: U.S. Geological Survey.

Let’s go back to the previous idea for a moment. Let’s say that under pressure, some parts of a tectonic plate is starting to fold. As the pressure grows and grows, at one point the rock can simply break. Faults are those breaks, they’re the planar fractures or discontinuities in volumes of rock. They can vary tremendously in size from a few centimeters to mountain-sized.

Basically, when big blocks of rock are broken through faulting, some of them can be pushed up or down, and thus block mountains can result. Higher blocks are called horsts and troughs are called grabens. Their size can also be impressive, though they’re generally not as big as the fold mountains because the process which generates them takes place on a smaller scale and involves less pressure. Still, the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are a good example of block mountains, feature a block 650 km long and 80 km wide. Another good example is the Rhine Valley and the Vosges mountain in Europe. Rift valleys can also generate block mountains, as is the case in the Eastern African Rift, for example.

It can be quite difficult to identify a block mountain without knowing its underlying geology but generally, they tend to have a steep side and a slowly sloping side.Volcanic mountains

Annotated view includes Ushkovsky, Tolbachik, Bezymianny, Zimina, and Udina stratovolcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia. Image taken aboard the ISS in 2013.

Everyone knows something about volcanoes, though we rarely think about them as mountains (and truth be told, they aren’t always mountains).Volcanic mountains are created when magma from deep under the surface starts to rise up. At one point, it erupts in the form of lava, and then cools down, solidifies, and starts to pile on, building a mountain. Mount Fuji in Japan and Mount Rainier are typical examples of volcanic mountains — with Mount Rainier being one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. However, it’s not necessary for the volcano to be active.

The summit of Mauna Kea. Image credits: Pixabay.

Several types of volcanoes can generate mountains, with Stratovolcanoes typically being the biggest ones. Despite Mount Everest being the tallest mountain above sea level, Mauna Kea is actually much taller than Everest — at over 10,000 meters. However, much of it is submerged, with only 4205 meters rising above sea level.

Dome mountains

Dome mountains are also the result of magmatic activity, though they are not volcanic in nature.

Sometimes, lots of magma can accumulate beneath the ground and start to swell the surface up. Sometimes, it never reaches the surface but still forms a dome. As that magma cools down and solidifies, it is often tougher than other surrounding rocks can be exposed after millions of years of erosion. The mountain is this dome — a former accumulation of magma which cooled down and was exposed by erosion.

Round Mountain is a relatively recent dome mountain. It represents a volcanic feature of the Canadian Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province that formed in the past 1.6 million. Black Dome Mountain is another popular example, also in Canada.

Other types of mountains

As we mentioned above, there’s no strict classification of all mountains, so other types are sometimes mentioned.

Plateau mountains

Basically, plateau mountains aren’t formed by something going up — they’re formed by something going down. Imagine a plateau, for instance. Let’s say it has a river on it. Year after year, that river carves a part of the plateau, bit by bit. After some time, there might only be a bit of the original plateau left un-eroded, and that part basically becomes a mountain. This generally takes a very long time even by geological standards and can go up to billions of years. Some geologists group all these mountains along with dome mountains into a broader category called erosional mountains.

Uplifted passive margins

There’s no geological model to fully explain how uplifted passive margins formed, but we do see them in the world. The Scandinavian Mountains, Eastern Greenland, the Brazilian Highlands or Australia’s Great Dividing Range are such examples, owing their existence to some uplifting mechanism.

Hotspot mountains

The trail of underwater mountains created as the tectonic plate moved across the Hawaii hotspot over millions of years. Image credits: USGS.

Although once thought to be identical to volcanic mountains, new research has shed some light on this belief. Hotspots are volcanic regions thought to be fed by a part of the underlying mantle which is significantly hotter than its surroundings. However, even though that hot area is fixed, the plates move around it — causing it to leave a hotspot trail of mountains.

agelbert • 2 days ago Great article! I know that it is very controversial in main stream academic geology circles, but what do you think of the theory of global expansion causing mountain formation as the surface of the sphere becomes less curved? There is indisputable geologic evidence that all the ocean basins are much younger than the earth's crust on continents. Tectonic plate theory does not have an answer to that but the expanding earth theory fits the planetary geology much better. I am not saying that plate tectonics are not involved in mountain formation; I am saying that an expanding globe combined with plate tectonics is a more comprehensive theory of our geology.

Mihai > ⦁ agelbert ⦁ a day ago I'm not particularly familiar with this theory, but the tectonic mechanism of orogeny is pretty well established.

agelbert > Andrei Mihai • 17 hours ago Well, the maximum age of the ocean basins is about 190 million years. But the thing that is most convincing to me that something besides plate tectonics is at work is the distance of the oceanic rifts from the land masses of Australia and Antarctica. It makes no sense UNLESS they stretched apart without any subduction whatsoever.

Also, the closer you get to the oceanic volcanic ridges, the younger the crust is. Finally the crust of the earth is thinner in the ocean basins than on continents. All of that argues for global expansion.

I know you will think this unscientific, but I am familiar with stretch marks on human female breasts when they grow too quickly for the skin to adjust normally. The ocean basin topography looks uncannily like these types of stretch marks. But the stretching of landscape on land is a known geologic feature that also appears to be identical, though in much smaller scale to the oceanic "stretch mark" like topography.

Please watch the video and tell me what you think is inaccurate about global expansion theory.

Two intriguing screen shots from the Expanding Earth video:

Expanding Earth versus Plate Tectonics

Continental fit only on a smaller earth globe

Posted by: AGelbert

Last week, NASA’s Cassini probe performed the first dive around Saturn’s rings as part of its Grand Finale — a series of hula hoop jumps through the gaps of Saturn’s rings before the spacecraft is scheduled to crash in the planet’s atmosphere. We learned quite a lot from this episode, such as that the gap between the gas giant’s rings is more or less empty. Apparently, not only did Cassini acoustically record what happened as charged particles whizzed past the spacecraft, it also filmed Saturn’s atmosphere as it traveled above it. Hit play for a glimpse of this one-of-a-kind spectacle.

What you’re seeing here compressed in less than a minute was actually filmed over an hour and then sped up. Cassini captured shots of the planet’s whirling atmosphere as it traveled southward from 45,000 miles above the surface at the start of the video to 4,200 miles by the end of the show. This is why the quality of the video seems to abruptly change since “the smallest resolvable features in the atmosphere changed from 5.4 miles (8.7 kilometers) per pixel to 0.5 miles (810 meters) per pixel,” NASA explained in the press release.

This amazing photo was shot by Cassini on April 12 at a distance of 1,400 million km from Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

One of the highlights is the flyby above Saturn’s famous hexagon-shaped cloud patterns. These can be twice as wide as Earth’s diameter and are formed by jet streams.

“I was surprised to see so many sharp edges along the hexagon’s outer boundary and the eye-wall of the polar vortex,” said Kunio Sayanagi, an associate of the Cassini imaging team based at Hampton University in Virginia, in a statement. “Something must be keeping different latitudes from mixing to maintain those edges,” he added.

If you thought this video was impressive, the next passes should render even sharper and captivating interesting images after the Cassini team change the spacecraft’s “conservative” camera settings.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Cassini will make about 20 more passes around Saturn and its rings before finally making its final jump into the planet’s atmosphere sometime in September 2017.

“The spacecraft is now on a ballistic path, so that even if we were to forgo future small course adjustments using thrusters, we would still enter Saturn’s atmosphere on Sept. 15 no matter what,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL.

These fantastic little organs allow the fish to absorb oxygen from the water and use it for energy. Functionally, gills are not that dissimilar to the lungs in humans and other mammals. The main difference is how they are able to absorb much smaller concentrations of available oxygen, while allowing the fish to maintain an appropriate level of Sodium Chloride (salt) in their bloodstream.

Gills work on the same principle as lungs. In the lungs, there are small sacs called alveoli that are approximately 70% capillaries. These capillaries carry deoxygenated blood from the body. As oxygen and carbon dioxide pass across the alveoli’s membrane, the capillaries take the newly oxygenated blood back to the body. Similarly, gills have small rows and columns of specialized cells grouped together called the epithelium. Deoxygenated blood in the fish is supplied directly from the heart to the epithelium via arteries, and even yet smaller arterioles. As seawater is forced across the epithelium membranes, dissolved oxygen in the seawater is taken up by tiny blood vessels and veins, while the carbon dioxide is exchanged.

Gills themselves have a car radiator-like appearance. Most fish have 4 gills on each side, consisting of a main bar-like structure that has numerous branches as that of a tree, and those branches consisting of even smaller branch-like structures. This arrangement of cells allows for a very large surface area when the gills are immersed in water.

Functionally, the mechanism for pumping water over the radiator-like gills seems to vary depending on the species of fish. In general, this is achieved by the fish lowering the floor of the mouth and widening the outer skin flap that protects the gills, called the operculum. This increase in volume lowers the pressure within the mouth causing the water to rush in. As the fish raises the floor of their mouth, an inward fold of skin forms a valve of sorts which doesn’t allow water to rush out. The pressure is then increased compared to the outside of the mouth and the water is forced through the operculum opening and across the gills.

Gills themselves need a very large surface area to provide the fish with the necessary oxygen demands. Air is approximately 21% oxygen or about 210,000 parts per million. Water, on the other hand, only has about 4-8 parts per million of dissolved oxygen that the gills can extract. Because of this, if the fish did not have a large gill surface area to absorb as much oxygen as it can for it’s size, it would quickly suffocate. Cold blooded animals also tend to have a lower metabolism than their warm blooded counterparts. This aids them in their ability to handle environments of low available oxygen. Should the same size fish be warm blooded, the metabolism of the little swimmer would be increased to the point that the available oxygen would not be sufficient and little Nemo would perish.

While the large gill surface area allows for sufficient exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen, it at the same time exposes the same large blood volume to the hypertonic (that is, saltier than thou) sea water, creating a situation in which fish must have a backup mechanism for expelling excess sodium that has been incidentally absorbed. Conversely, freshwater fish need to have an opposite mechanism allowing them to excrete excess water to keep their sodium levels appropriately high. Never mind about those anadromous gypsies who trounce back and forth, able to thrive in both fresh and salt water environments. We will just call them show offs and leave it at that.

To deal with this sodium problem, inside the gill resides nifty little cells called chloride cells. These cells allow for the extrusion of any unwanted sodium. Freshwater fish tend to have less of these cells than do their seafaring counterparts. This, combined with the ability to have extremely diluted urine, allows fresh water fish to keep their sodium level appropriately high.

Chloride Cells (cc) of Nile tilapia seen as dark dots with examples encircled.

Fig. 4. Chloride cells (cc) of Nile tilapia, seen as dark dots with examples encircled, are situated in the filamental epithelium at the base of the lamellae (gl). Control fish A. In the 6 h and 24 h post treatment groups, chloride cells had migrated towards the apices of the lamella (arrow) B. This phenomenon was observed in both the clipped and handled fish. cc: chloride cell, gf: gill filament, gl: gill lamellae.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy subscribing to our new Daily Knowledge YouTube channel, as well as:

◾Whales Don’t Spray Water Out of Their Blowholes Nor are Their Throats and Blowhole Connected

◾Clownfish are All Born Male, a Dominant Male Will Turn Female When the Current Female of the Group Dies

◾The Candirú Fish Can’t Swim Up a Stream of Your Urine

◾Sushi is Not Raw Fish

◾Goldfish Do Not Have a Three Second Memory

Bonus Facts:

◾Given that the size of the gills helps with the uptake of oxygen, as you might expect, the more active a fish is, the bigger the gills compared to their body size.

◾Because the marine environment is hyperosmotic, boney fish tend to lose water through osmosis. Because of this. they tend to compensate by taking in water through the gut, thereby exacerbating the problem of sodium uptake.

◾The distance between the blood and water in the epithelial cells of fish is approximately 1 micro meter, or about 1 millionth of a meter.

◾At approximately 32,000 species, fish exhibit greater species diversity then any other class of vertebrates.

◾It is estimated that there are approximately 15,000 unidentified fish species.

◾Fossil evidence has suggested that fish have been on the earth for approximately 400 million years.

◾Fish that have the ability to live in both salt water and fresh water are called Anadromous fish.

◾Most boney fish maintain the sodium content of their body fluids at approximately 40% that of sea water.

◾Anadromous fish must have physiological processes to deal with the changing salt content in their environment. One mechanism used is that, while in fresh water, they tend to have the ability to excrete very dilute urine, thus removing more fresh water and keeping their sodium levels normal. While in salt water, they use a specialized group of salt excreting cells in the gills and mouth lining. They also have kidneys that can excrete very concentrated urine.

◾Sharks and Hagfish have a much greater salt content than bony fish and it is naturally in balance with ocean water, thus not having the bony fishes problem of salt regulation.

Agelbert NOTE: This is a BIG deal. WHY? Because, as much as I hate to admit it, this provides a way to escape the temperature effects (but NOT the ocean acidification effects!) of global warming.

This counterintuitive process gives the appearance of violating the second law of thermodynamics because it uses laser energy to COOL a gas or liquid.

Quote

The German scientist Rudolf Clausius laid the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 by examining the relation between heat transfer and work. His formulation of the second law, which was published in German in 1854, is known as the Clausius statement:

Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.

But laser cooling doesn't violate the above law, of course. So, how does it work it's magic of cooling, instead of heating, while ADDING energy to a system?

A tuned set of lasers is fired at a gas or a liquid. This uses energy. BUT the targeted gas or liquid does NOT heat up in this case; it RADICALLY COOLS!

Temperature is, as everybody knows, just a measurement of how fast the atoms/molecules are moving around in a given 3 dimensional space. Faster moving atomic mass is hotter while slower is cooler. Absolute zero temperature is full atom stop (in theory ).

The trick is making use of a weird property of photons which enables them to have momentum WITHOUT mass. The photons hit the target, transfer their momentum (but no mass) and SLOW the molecules down, making them real cold real fast.

The casual observer will scratch his head and ask WHY the momentum doesn't make some of the atoms/molecules go faster (by hitting them from behind instead of head on), since molecules are going in every which way all the time.

I mean, shouldn't it all sort of even out?

NOPE.

THAT has to do with photon frequencies. All atoms/molecules have absorption frequencies. A CO2 molecule will absorb high energy photons (UV band) and emit lower energy photons (IR band) which cannot get out of the earth's atmosphere. That's how global warming got going.

Well, the tuned laser photons (in the video below, they mention using six of them in GPS satellites for atomic clock cooling) do not hit atoms/molecules going AWAY from them because their frequency enables them to "miss" them (no photon momentum absorption due to Doppler effect frequency difference).

Quote

In the process of absorbing a photon, the atom receives a small push, a push in the direction away from the source of light, which is the key to laser cooling.

The end result is billions of molecules slowing down and getting real cold, real quick as a consequence of a teeny tiny amount of laser energy injected to do the cooling.

I hope you realize that this means we will soon have air conditioners that use MUCH LESS ENERGY (look ma, no compressor!). It's painfully obvious that lasers, BECAUSE they shoot ZERO MASS photons (there ain't any other kind of photons ), will require much less energy to cool down a gas than present refrigeration technology.

AND, they won't need any fancy refrigeration gas or fluid. WATER will do quite nicely for an ICE box refrigerator or air conditioner, thank you very much.

Posted by: AGelbert

Not all of NASA’s technology is classified. In fact, since 2014, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has released an annual software catalog, allowing the public to access and download a variety of technical applications. The software catalog is available free of charge, and includes software related to aeronautics, but also business systems, data processing and storage, and other operations. NASA is the first U.S. government agency to offer comprehensive software for public access. The goal of the project is to allow academics and entrepreneurs to learn from NASA's tools.

More about NASA:

•President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958.

•A variety of animals have been sent into space by NASA, including mice, frogs, birds, rabbits, insects, fish, guinea pigs, monkeys, and dogs.

•STS-135, the final Space Shuttle mission, took place in July 2011 using the orbiter Atlantis.

Posted by: AGelbert

James Sprittles, Assistant Professor in Mathematics, University of Warwick

March 22, 2017

Credit: Pixabay

From the raindrops that soak you on your way to work to the drops of coffee that inevitably end up on your white shirt when you arrive, you’d be forgiven for thinking of drops as a mere nuisance.

But beneath a mundane facade, droplets exhibit natural beauty and conceal complex physics that scientists have been trying to figure out for decades. Recently, I have contributed to this field by working on a new theory explaining what happens to the critical thin layer of air between a drop of water and a surface to cause a splash.

At just a few thousandths of a second, the lifetime of a splashing drop is too rapid for us to see. It took pioneering advances in high-speed imaging to capture these events – the most iconic being Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet in 1957. These pictures simultaneously captured the public’s imagination with their aesthetic nature while intriguing physicists with their surprising complexity. The most obvious question is why, and when, do drops splash?

Nowadays, cameras can take over a million frames per second and resolve the fine details of a splash. However, these advances have raised as many questions as they have answered. Most importantly, remarkable observations, coming from the NagelLab in 2005, showed that the air surrounding the drop plays a critical role. By reducing the air pressure, one can prevent a splash (see second video). In fact, drops which splash at the bottom of Mount Everest may not do so at the top, where the air pressure is lower.

The discoveries created an explosion of experimental work aimed at uncovering the curious details of the air’s role. New experimental methods revealed incredible dynamics: millimetre-sized liquid drops are controlled by the behaviour of microscopic air films that are 1,000 times smaller.

Notably, after a liquid drop contacts a solid it can be prevented from spreading across it by a microscopically thin layer of air that it can’t push aside. The sizes involved are equivalent to a one-centimetre layer of air stopping a tsunami wave spreading across a beach. When this occurs, a sheet of liquid can fly away from the main drop and break into smaller droplets – so that a splash is generated.

From a coffee stain all we can see is the outcome of this event – a pool of liquid (the drop) surrounded by a ring of smaller drops (the splash).

Major breakthrough

Experimental analyses have produced incredibly detailed observations of drops splashing. But they do not establish why the drops splash, which means we don’t understand the underlying physics. Remarkably, for such a seemingly innocuous problem the classical theory of fluids – used to forecast weather, design ships and predict blood flow – is inadequate. This is because the air layer’s height becomes comparable to the distance air molecules travel between collisions. So for this specific problem we need to feed in microscopic details that the classical theory simply doesn’t account for.

How a microscopic layer of air affects water droplets.

The air’s behaviour can only be captured by a theory originally developed for violent aerodynamic gas flows – such as for space shuttles entering the Earth’s atmosphere – namely the kinetic theory of gases. My new article, published in Physical Review Letters, is the first to use kinetic theory to understand how the air film behaves as it is displaced by a liquid spreading over a solid.

The article establishes criteria for the maximum speed at which a liquid can stably spread over a solid. It was already known that for a splash to be produced, this critical speed must be exceeded. If the speed is lower than that, the drop spreads smoothly instead. Notably, the new theory explains why reducing the air pressure can suppress splashing: in this case, air escapes more easily from the layer and provides less resistance to the liquid drop. This is the missing piece of a jigsaw to which numerous important scientific contributions have been made since the experimental discoveries of 2005.

Important applications

While being of fundamental scientific interest, an understanding of the conditions that cause splashing can be exploited – leading to potential breakthroughs in a number of practical fields.

One example is 3D printing where liquid drops form the building blocks of tailor-made products such as hearing aids. Here, stopping splashing is key to making products of the desired quality. Another important area is forensic science, where blood-stain-pattern analysis relies on splash characteristics to provide insight into where the blood came from – yielding vital information in a criminal investigation.

Most promisingly, the new theory will have applications to a wide range of related flows where microscopic layers of air appear. For example, in climate science it will enable us to understand how water drops collide during the formation of clouds and to estimate the quantity of gas being dragged into our oceans by rainfall.

Do keep this in mind the next time you splatter coffee drops across your desk. Take a moment to admire the pattern and appreciate the underlying complexity before cursing and heading for your “mopper upper” of choice.

James Sprittles, Assistant Professor in Mathematics, University of Warwick

I've known about the Space Elevator concept for at least a decade, and in principle it's plausible. The manufacturing and engineering challenges to actually building such a thing are incredible though, and I think his estimates of being able to get one up in 20 years are overly optimistic.

About the only thing that surprises me is that so far Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos hasn't done an IPO underwritten by The Squid to get the Big Elevator Corporation (Stock Ticker code BEC) off the ground. (pun intended)

Anybody got any idea what kind of accent the narrator has is? I never heard anyone speak English with that accent.

RE

He's hearing impaired. Probably about 20%. His delivery is similar to my youngest son's. He's hearing impaired as well.

I've known about the Space Elevator concept for at least a decade, and in principle it's plausible. The manufacturing and engineering challenges to actually building such a thing are incredible though, and I think his estimates of being able to get one up in 20 years are overly optimistic.

About the only thing that surprises me is that so far Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos hasn't done an IPO underwritten by The Squid to get the Big Elevator Corporation (Stock Ticker code BEC) off the ground. (pun intended)

Anybody got any idea what kind of accent the narrator has is? I never heard anyone speak English with that accent.

RE

I don't know. I'll take a wild guess and say P. K. Aravind is from India but lives in the U.K. .

Posted by: AGelbert

Well, if that isn't enough to interest you, how about the fact that the U.S. Government had some rather ambitious ideas about being the top dog in the world as far back as 1894!

Ya see, the Washington Monument was the FIRST BUILDING in about five thousand years to be taller than the tallest of the Egyptian Pyramids (except a cathedral tower that collapsed shortly after they built it).

In this episode we examine the concept of a Space Elevator, a popular piece of developing technology designed to lift people and cargo into space at a fraction of normal launch costs. We will look at technology as well as many of the misconceptions about Space Elevators which have emerged.